Georgetown Blows By Brown, 74-57

Your Georgetown Fighting Hoyas routed the visiting Brown Bears early Monday night before holding on late for a 74-57 victory. LJ Peak led a balanced scoring effort with 13 points, Bradley Hayes posted his second straight double-double, and Georgetown's defense held Brown to just 15 first-half points and 28 percent field-goal shooting for the game. The win was Georgetown's fourth straight, a streak that has seen Hoyas thoroughly dominating each opponent for stretches.

Pick any point in the first half, and you'll see a snapshot of a blowout. The visitors managed just 4 points across the game's first 10 minutes. Brown couldn't find an open look from the perimeter or near the basket, where the energetic Georgetown defense blocked 6 shots and contested many more.

The Hoyas scored pretty much wherever they wanted, getting easy points in the paint, in transition, and from the outside. Hayes once again put in near-automatic buckets from the post. The senior big man has become a mainstay of the Georgetown offense, tallying double-figure points in six of eight games this season, including the last four, while leading the team in rebounding.  The transition from punch line to centerpiece has been so swift that we risk taking it for granted.

But Hayes didn't do it alone against Brown. In one particularly efficient stretch, five different Hoyas scored a total of 12 points in 6 possessions to push their advantage to 18. From beyond the arc, Peak, D'Vauntes Smith-Rivera, and Isaac Copeland hit a pair of three-pointers apiece, while Marcus Derrickson buried another triple for good measure. When Peak his pair of bombs to close out the half (doubling his total of made three pointers on the season), Georgetown's lead swelled to 46-15 entering intermission.

While Georgetown built its lead, JT3 reached deep into the bench. Eight Hoyas scored before the break. In addition to the headliners, Jessie Govan saw extended, productive run. The freshman center operated from the high post, where he was able to show off his full range of skills, especially locating cutters with precision passing (among them Paul White, who scored his first basket of the season). Govan has evident talent but needs all the playing time he can get to put his game together in a consistent way at the college level.

After the break, Brown played better than its abysmal earlier play, Georgetown let up a bit, JT3 tinkered with lineups, and the referees got happy with their whistles. The last put a drag on already languid second-half play, and helped the Bears put a dent in, if not exactly a threat to, the Georgetown lead. Brown shot 27 free throws in the game to Georgetown's 9, with 23 of those freebies, including 22 makes, coming after intermission. To some degree, the fouls could be attributed to reaching and carelessness by a Georgetown defense that played with more vigor before the half. But the disparity and frequency of the whistles were enough for the Georgetown bench to draw a rare technical foul in the game's final minutes.

Still, the result never really was in doubt. The 17-point final margin was as close as the second half got, even as JT3 played all of his reserves. No one played more than 23 minutes, and Kaleb Johnson and Trey Mourning saw plenty of action for the first time since Georgetown returned to full strength.

Overall, this was another convincing, if not quite overwhelming win in the middle of a non-conference home stand. While we'd all like a 40-point beat down here and there, a half-time blowout followed by 20 minutes of deep bench minutes and experimental lineups is at least as valuable. Particularly given Georgetown's early-season injuries, the liberal allocation of minutes to the bench are likely to pay dividends later in the season.

Georgetown returns to action Saturday against UNC-Wilmington, the first of three straight against mediocre, but by no means pushover, competition that also includes proven early-season Cinderella Monmouth. The Hoyas will need to bring the same effort as in the first half against Brown for the entirety of each of those match-ups to avoid another Radford.  Until then, Hoya Saxa.